1. Technical Field
The technical field relates to media distribution and more specifically to maintaining security and enforcing playback restrictions on media distribution, such as through embedded media players.
2. Introduction
Media can be distributed in many ways in an online environment. One way to handle media distribution is to provide an embedded or embeddable player to a client. For example, many web sites currently use an embedded Adobe® Flash® player, HTML5, or other plug-in based media playback architecture. These embedded players are typically very static and are independent of time, IP address, domain, user id, and so forth, even regardless of an authentication layer or a subscription layer. Thus, a malicious user can take the embedded player from the source, such as a secured page, for playback on other sites or for playback that ignores a particular content security scheme. This vulnerability makes the content less secure, because a user can play the content regardless of restrictions on the time limit, protected domains, particular IP addresses or ranges, and/or associated users.
These shortcomings hinder content distribution and cause uncertainty for content owners. Other, more secure content distribution approaches exist, but are not as flexible as web-based content distribution.